I know this has been an infuriating topic for a while now, but gosh it’s getting on my nerves. I’m trying to watch Secret Level, finally, and I can’t see half of what’s happening because so many scenes across many of the shorts are pretty much pitch black.
Why?? Why not, y’know, just give us a little bit of fucking contrast? Instead, I have to choose whether to have a light on or to not see the scenes.
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Did you take your sunglasses off?
Of course not! It’s nighttime!
What kind of nerd do you take me for?
Thanks that was it
Probably need to tweak the settings on whatever display you’re using, or potentially consider investing in a more-modern type of panel depending on what you have now.
Dark shows on decent/properly calibrated screens are my crack tho. Why must you deprive me.
You do you, boo. I just want to see what I’m watching ;-;
You know what, fair enough. My reply was more tongue in cheek. I don’t doubt it would be frustrating.
What’s your exact watching setup? Like TV, room, player, source?
There are likely ways to mitigate this, but it all depends on your setup.
Gotham was bad for this
HDR
They’re taking advantage of the ability to do so with modern cameras and TVs because a dark look communicates something - a dark mood for example. It contrasts with other shows or scenes.
It stands out to me when a scene is supposed to be at night but obviously has a 100ft light tower just off camera. Toning it down looks good.
I have to choose whether to have a light on or to not see the scenes.
have you ever adjusted your TV? sounds to me like it might just need some calibrating.
I guess I’ve gotta figure this out. It’s pretty new and I thought it was supposed to just be able to help with the darkness. But I dunno
well no, they usually need some calibration to start. every display panel is a little tiny bit different, and the rooms they go into are very different, not to mention the types of media played on them vary. what looks good in one room with one kind of media will look poor in another room with a different kind of media. you just gotta adjust it to find what works for you in your room.
of course I also found it helps to invest in some blackout curtains for when you want to watch a movie. we’ve got a projector and a dropdown screen that covers a wall, so we use the curtains to make sure it’s dark enough in the room for that. but they also help with seeing a screen.
It’s pretty new
Almost all TVs come with a power saving or eco mode enabled by default which ruins visibility. Find that in the settings and turn it off. You should also turn off motion interpolation (e.g Trumotion, Clear Motion Plus, Motionflow) so motion doesn’t become a smeary and artificial mess.
What video player doesn’t have a gamma slider?
Your display likely has some sort of brightness/contrast setting.
If you’re playing this movie on a computing device, the video player software likely also has adjustment settings at the software level. I use
mpvon Linux to watch most video, and there, by default, 1 and 2 are contrast, 3 and 4 brightness, and 5 and 6 gamma.yeah, MPV is the goat
I’ve noticed this problem with a lot of media made in the past decade. I think Netflix’s ‘Ozark’ is one of the worst examples. In almost every indoor scene the lights are off or very dim.
However, I got an oled screen this year, and it’s helped a lot with dim scenes. I’m guessing hollywood is calibrating for expensive high contrast screens like oled and mini-led?
I think this is the real answer. HDR is a thing and the baseline for expected dynamic range is higher than both what older displays can produce and older eyes can consume.
Lighting is expensive!
They are giving you contrast, lots more contrast.
That’s actually the problem, most people don’t have very good displays and additionally watch dark content in lit rooms - but showrunners are pushing for HDR, when you’ve got a $20k Sony OLED PVM in bt2020 or ‘color space off’ (native gamma), everything looks good. (There is a BT709/sRGB emulation mode, but I don’t think they care enough to use it)
Try to watch the same on an IPS LCD with possibly not even 100% SRGB coverage and you’re going to have a bad time. Even a VA will have a bad time if viewed off-axis.
You can usually fix it by turning off power saving/eco mode and setting the gamma to 2.2 on your TV. You should also turn off motion smoothing (Trumotion/Auto Motion Plus/Motionflow/Clear Motion) so motion doesn’t look overly smooth and fake.
I hate that motion smoothing is turned on by default these days. I know it’s because sports fans want it enabled, but it makes literally everything else look like a garbage low budget soap opera.
In audio, you would test with multiple reference monitors and rooms. Cellphone, car, shitty tv speakers, mono, various headphones, etc. The idea being you record/edit/mix it on normal monitors, but then check it out in ways that normal people will, to see if it translates well or will sound like shit.
I get where you’re coming from but movie audio also fails here. The same darkness discussion arises about dialogue-to-explosion volume regularly :)
That doesn’t take away from what you said they “proper” audio work is done that way …
Oh yeah, “movie theater dynamics” on home mixes kills me. I’m so glad Hollywood has, or at least had a period of that being toned down. Like I get the need to have explosions explosively louder than a whispering scene, but Jesus fucking Christ, give me a break, it doesn’t need to be THAT extreme.
In some movies when I’m watching at home, I swear, there’s a noticable two-mode system that’s quite clearly loud-mode and quiet-mode, that if you had a macro on your volume, you could literally switch between, and the mastering would fit perfectly, and it’s probably only 6-12db different.
That type of thing just isn’t necessary. Or maybe there could be a different audio track. People have the bandwidth and storage, now, it’d be fine.
Can confirm. The most important test for my mixes is the car test. Get your buddies together, and hopefully they have a variety of cars. Play it in a nice car with great speakers, play it in a shitty 2001 Corolla with a blown out cone in the passenger door, and as many in between as you can get. The more homogenous the listening experience is across those cars, the better your mix will sound on a variety of systems.
For most people, their car is the best sound system they own. It’s also where people do a lot of listening, because very few people drive in complete silence. So if it sounds like ass in the car, people will stop listening.
Being able to balance for road noise masking may actually be the greatest skill on earth.
Picard season 3 is very much a standout for this trend.
It actually took me several seconds to notice the man in the first picture
That is odd. It looks fine for me. Are you running a really old display?
I didn’t have any problem with the guy in the first picture either, but I would be willing to bet that many of us are viewing this thread using very different display brightness/contrast settings.
I’m currently looking at it on a laptop. My laptop has no light sensor with automatic brightness adjustment, and I use the laptop in a wide range of environments, so I need to use
brightnessctlon Linux to fiddle the brightness, usually between about 10% and 60%. It’s not like there’s one single “correct brightness” when I’m in a ton of different environments.My desktop’s monitor doesn’t have a light sensor with automatic brightness adjustment either.
There’s probably some way to go get a brightness sensor and a daemon to auto-fiddle the thing on the desktop — webcams, which often have automatic brightness adjustment themselves, aren’t great for this. But, well, I never got around to it.
Lol I didn’t notice till I read your comment.
Light is expensive in the 24th century.
Not so much in the 23rd century Kelvin-verse:
The lights were too high for 100 years so they’re compensating. Dilithium crystals got expensive when the Ferengi cornered the market.
Maybe they are actually in the dark dimension!
Just watch Star Trek Enterprise instead… :)
Wow, is the Enterprise lose their engineer so no bulb is being replaced?
It’s the Titan-A, but seems like everyone is photosensitive for some reason.
Same feel.
Wow, that is egregiously bad. Almost impossible to tell what’s going on in the first shot. Like, even in a dark shot you still need to be able to see their silhouettes or something. This just looks like a bunch of blobs.
I think he’s playing a very small piano.
I don’t see the problem? I can see the character’s expressions, their stances, their clothes and clothing decorations, the objects they’re holding… I don’t necessarily agree that this should be the way a federation starship would be lit, but I don’t see why people would say they couldn’t see anything.
Well yeah, there are only 4 lights.
That series should be erased from history
they assume people have better TVs now than a decade or more ago
so those of us watching on older hardware suffer
side note: my OLED TV is fantastic for contrast. the smooth motion shit glitches the fuck out sometimes though no matter which setting it is on (including off, somehow?), and it’s a smart TV so now it constantly asks for me to update it so it can spy on me more or some shit idk. super fucking annoying to have to dismiss a popup every time it turns on
